Installation Problems - Missing Hard Drive?

[brutalspoon]

Hi guys,

I'm not entirely sure if this is the right category for this thread, but it seems to be the one that closest fits my problem.

A bit of background detail to this story (which you may already know if you've seen my other threads):

I had my desktop PC running W7 fine despite some hitches with an old hard drive of mine. I was able to get hold of a slightly higher specced system recently (a pre-built Acer Aspire T650-8B7H, if that means anything to anyone which has a slightly faster processor, an apparently better motherboard, yada yada) and so transferred my 9800GTX+, RAM, PSU and hard drive in to the new PC. However, obviously Windows 7 didn't like the significantly different hardware so I nuked the drive and went to reinstall Windows 7, only to find that the Windows 7 install disc refused to pick up my SATA drive (which I had Windows 7 installed on before) in the new PC. Conveniently at the same time my problematic hard drive completely died on me, so I shrugged it off as that being the problem. However...

I've just bought myself a 500GB Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive. It's very nice, and I had no problems partitioning it up and installing multiple linux distributions on multiple partitions. However, I stuck my Windows 7 install disc in to install it on the drive. I choose to make a custom installation and... nothing. The drive just doesn't show up. I'm told to load drivers, but since when do you need to install drivers for an internal hard drive?

I've had this problem before and thought it was a problem with the hard drive, but it shouldn't be happening to a brand new drive. The install disc picks up IDE drives just fine, but as of yet it hasn't found either of the SATA disks I've had in there.

Any ideas? I would put it down to a BIOS setting but I had no problems installing Linux on other partitions of the same drive.

Any help would be (as always) greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
BrutalSpoon

 

[daship]

Make sure ide mode is enabled in the bios on the SATA ports.

 

[ulysses35]

if you go into disk management you will probably find that windows has not assigned a drive letter to the drive.

Now if you have already used the drive to install other OS's then be careful as windows may want you to format the drive before it recognises it

 

[brutalspoon]

*headdesks* Doesn't matter, I finally managed to get it working.

Probably the most obvious thing to do, it was just a matter of getting SATA drivers from the Acer website. Loaded them onto a USB drive, stuck it in and it worked instantly. *sheepish grin* Ah well, I won't make that mistake again!

In my defence I asked one of my friends whether it might be SATA drivers and he completely denied that it could be that, though